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IPFS News Link • American History

The Jefferson Nobody Knows

• LewRockwell.com by Tom Woods

A Radical's Struggle to Remake America. It could well have been called The Jefferson Nobody Knows.

Jefferson, Gutzman reminds us, had such a fertile mind that he would devote himself to the study of a subject and become the leading figure of his day in that area. Architecture may be the most obvious example – at the time of the bicentennial, the American Institute of Architects declared Jefferson's work on the University of Virginia to be America's outstanding architectural achievement. But he was also learned in numerous other fields, including ethnography and ethnohistory, and in fact he carried out the first archaeological excavation in North America.

Thankfully, Gutzman has not given us another conventional Jefferson biography, complete with soporific discussions of the man's relationships with his family members and other antiquarian trivia. Chances are, Gutzman has said, the average person who's curious about Jefferson is unlikely to read more than 300 pages about him over the course of a lifetime. So those 300 pages ought to be laser focused on principles, ideas, and areas of work that can be traced throughout Jefferson's career and that made him who he was.

So Gutzman focuses on five significant areas of Jefferson's thought and work that are central to his place in American history: federalism; freedom of conscience; slavery, race, and colonization; the Indians; and the University of Virginia (and his thoughts on education more broadly).


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